1. Chapter 5
The Meaning and Value of Work

2. Discussion Case
Social Enterprise and Social
Entrepreneurs

3. • What makes a career successful
• By what criteria would you judge that you’ve had a successful
career?
• Is it enough to say that you are employed?
• Is it important the job be long term and pay a lot
• How much is “a lot”?
• Is success measured by income?
• Would it matter if you were underemployed; that is if your career
was not challenging and did not require the knowledge and skills
that you acquired during your education?
• Does it matter what goods or service your career produced?
• Would it matter how well you performed your job-related tasks?
• Does it matter the type of work you do and who you worked door?
• Does your care serve a purpose?

4. • In most discussion about business and ethics:
pursuit of profit is at odds with the pursuit of
personal and social responsibilities.
– Business Ethics: oxymoron
– What message sent to employees when the
pursuit of profit, the guiding principle of their time
at work, is thought to be incompatible with doing
the socially responsible thing?
– Is it possible to find meaning and value at work if
employees are told to check their conscience at
the door?

5. • Organizations that pursue social ends as the
very core of their mission
– Non-profit, NGO’s, foundations, professional
organizations, schools, colleges, and government
agencies.
• Social Entrepreneurship or social enterprise:
challenges the assumption that one cannot
pursue both profit and social causes
– Social entrepreneurship differs from work of
nonprofit groups such s NGO’s and corporate
foundation in that they explicitly seek profit.

6. • Social Entrepreneurship: involves the standard
entrepreneurial characteristics of innovation,
creativity, and risk-taking, but marshals these
skills to address social needs.
– Entrepreneurs: the first who identify an untapped
market and then are creative in developing a
means for meeting this demand and are willing to
take the risk that their creation will, in fact, satisfy
the demand.
• Untapped market: social and ethical need such as social
justice, environmental protection, educating, health
care.

7. • Mohammad Yunus (best-known social entrepreneurs):
founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh
– Economist, US professor, returned to Bangladesh 1970
soon after gained independence from Pakistan.
– Contribute to this new country's independence with his
expertise in economics
– Bangladesh poor country struggling with effect of a harsh
famine.
– Grameen Bank was born from recognition that very small
amounts of capital, loaned directly to poor people at low
rates, could have a tremendous positive impact in helping
entire villages escape a cycle of poverty.
– Grameen Bank’s model; lend small amounts of money
directly to the poorest people to help them establish and
sustain small businesses.

8. • Yonus identified social need: small loans at
interest rates small enough to allow craftswomen
to escape a cycle of poverty.
– Came u with idea of founding a bank specializing in
microfinance
• Capital raised though donations and grants at the start, but
as Grameen’s success grew, all loans are now capitalized
through deposits and interest earned from lending.
• Bank owned by barrowers, does not require collateral for its
loans
• Today would be the envy of other banks which didn’t survive
the financial crisis
• Has issued over $ 8 billion in micro lending loans and has
repayment rate of 98 percent
• 2006 Yunas awarded Nobel Peace Price

9. • Mozilla: company that produced Firefox
– A for-profit subsidiary of Mozilla foundation, non profit
organization
– Describes itself as a global community of thousands who
believe in power of technology to enrich people’s lives.
– Public benefit organization dedicated not to making money
but to improving the way people everywhere experience
the Internet.
• Work: in the decades after WWII, understood as an
industrial model
– A career existed in a long-term relationship within a single
firm
– Employees received: steady and stable employment,
secure wages and benefits, and opportunities of
promotion within the firm.

10. – Employers received benefits of increased productivity
created by a stable, experienced, and competent
workforce
– This model of work served the purposes of both
employees and employers.
• 1990’s experienced period of economic growth,
prosperity fueled by increased worker productivity and
extraordinary technological advancements.
– Workplace experienced major shifts caused by significant
corporate layoffs as witnessed by now words like
“downsizing "and “outsourcing” of jobs to cheaper labor
markets offshore.
• 2008-2009 Economic Recession resulted in higher
unemployment rates that economists predict will
continue for years as the “new normal”.

11. • Social entrepreneurship and social enterprises
provide helpful background against which to
reflect on the changing nature of work.
• Times when employees can no longer count
on long-term stable employment from a single
local company,
– how, if at all can a person find a meaningful and
successful career?
– Can the workplace provide meaning and purpose,
or is better to think of the workplace as capable of
providing nothing other than jobs, nothing other
than a place where one earns money?